The Jazz Kid
Authors: James Lincoln Collier
THE
JAZZ KID
Copyright © 1994 by James Lincoln Collier
All rights reserved.
First ebook copyright © 2013 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.
978-1-62064-651-9 Trade
978-0-7927-9784-5 Library
Cover photo © Anna Bryukhanova/iStock.com
******
O
THER E
B
OOKS BY
J
AMES
L
INCOLN
C
OLLIER
:
Chipper
The Corn Raid
The Dreadful Revenge of Ernest Gallen
The Empty Mirror
Give Dad My Best
It's Murder at St. Baskets
Me and Billy
My Crooked Family
Outside Looking In
Planet Out of the Past
Rich and Famous
Rock Star
The Teddy Bear Habit
When the Stars Begin to Fall
Wild Boy
The Winchesters
The Worst of Times
For Tristan
******
A
UTHOR
'
S
N
OTE
Readers should be warned that I have used in this book a few racial and ethnic nicknames, such as “nigger” and “Chink.” Today these terms are considered insulting and are generally avoided. But at the time this story took place, they were standard usage in common speech. I have included them for the sake of historical accuracy and because one of the themes of the book is the racial attitudes of the time, but that does not indicate that I encourage their use.
Contents
Map of Downtown Chicago â Jazz Age Sites
How Much of this Book Is True?
T
HE WAY IT
started was, when I was twelve and going into the seventh grade. A couple of days before the Fourth of July, my big brother, John, found out there would be a parade over on Halsted Street. He told Ma he'd take me over if she gave us each a dime for ice cream. Ma said John shouldn't be so greedy for money, he should take me over for nothing, but in the end she gave us each a nickel and we went.
Well, it was a peach all right, that parade. There was a mess of soldiers in brown uniforms marching with their guns held just so and their legs scissoring along together. There were a couple of touring cars filled with old fellas in suits who were left over from some war I was supposed to know about but didn't; and a whole slew of bands coming along one after another, so that the music from one hadn't died out before the next one took up. For a little while you could hear them both at once, playing different songs at different speeds. John said, “They ought to space the bands out more so you couldn't hear two at once.”
But I liked hearing two bands at once. It gave me a thrill up my back for some reason. I don't know why it did, it just did. “What's wrong with hearing two bands at once, John?”
“You can't hear the songs right if they both come together.” John was three years older than me and got A's in everything at school.
“I don't care,” I said. “I like it that way.”
“You would, Paulie,” John said. “That's why you always flunk at school.”
I still didn't care. I liked hearing them that way, so I stood there as each band passed listening hard for the next one, and sure enough, in about a minute I'd begin to pick up the music of the next band, playing a different song. For a little while there I'd be able to hear both bands at once. I'd close my eyes and listen, just to get that thrill. Then the first band would die out and I'd open my eyes again.
I had them open down toward the end of the parade, when along came a band of
kids
around my ageâmaybe a little older. They were wearing the snazziest uniforms I ever did seeâon a kid at leastâ red jackets with gold buttons, blue trousers with gold stripes down the legs, caps with gold initials stitched into them. All of them tootling away on shiny trombones and cornets, banging on golden cymbals and big fat drums. They looked as famous as could be.
Oh, how I wanted to be in that band. Oh, how I wanted to be right down there in the middle of all that confusion of red and gold, the shininess of things, the banging and booming and tootling, the scissoring legs, and the sound of two different songs going on at the same time.
Finally it was over. I looked at John. “John, do you think Ma and Pa would let me get into a band?”
“Pa wouldn't. Ma might. She might figure it would teach you to discipline yourself.”
“Maybe it would.” I wasn't sure I wanted to learn to discipline myself.
“You'd have to practice your instrument.”
“I could make myself practice.” I wasn't sure about that, either. But it might be worth it.
John laughed. “Paulie, Ma and Pa have been trying to teach you to discipline yourself all your life. Pa says it's like trying to teach a frog to play the banjo.”
I gave him a look. “You'll see, John.” But I couldn't really tell John the truth about it, because he'd give me a funny look. Pa had got his mind made up that me and John would come into the plumbing business with him as soon as we finished our schooling, get married, and have nice homes the way he did. John was all for it. “Pa's done the hard part,” he always said. “We'll be walking into a good thing.” That was right. Pa had come up hard and had to go to work at twelve. Back when John was little Pa worked fourteen, fifteen hours a day to build the business up. They used to live in an apartment with a toilet down the hall. Now we had a nice apartment with an inside bathroom, not down the hall, or out in the backyard, like the Flynns; and a carpet on the living-room floor and lampshades with fringes on them. John liked the idea of all that.
But
it was too planned out for me. I wasn't the type of person who liked things planned out. Pa and John were. Pa was always making lists of things he had to do. He was always on us to make lists, too, and John would, at least sometimes. But I didn'tâI just didn't like the idea of making lists. Oh, I knew I should. But how could you get yourself to like doing something when you didn't like doing it?
But I liked the idea of being in that band all right, all red and gold, whamming and banging, and two songs going at the same time. So that night at supper I brought it up. Like John figured, Pa was dead set against it. He said, “You never took anything serious in your life. You do lousy at school, you leave your clothes all over the floor, you never remember to take the garbage down. I'm not having you waste your time over music until you get serious about the important things. Look at Johnâwhy can't you be more like him?”
I wished Pa wouldn't say that all the time. Pa was fair, and only spanked me a few times when I was little and richly deserved it, the way Ma put it. And he only docked my allowance when I richly deserved it, too, which was often enough, for I was already into January and it was only July But he had only one way of looking at things, and it was John's way, not mine.
The funny thing is, if Pa had been all for my taking up music, I probably would have lost interest in it. But the more he argued against it, the more determined I got. When you got down to it, I could have already been studying music. Back when I was in the third grade Ma could already see I wasn't going to be the student type, like John. To cheer herself up about me, she decided maybe I was more the artistic type. Pa said if she meant by that I was bone lazy, she was probably right. “What that boy needs is to have his fanny tanned,” he said. “Why can't he follow John's example?”
“Well, he isn't like John,” Ma said. “Paulie's got his own view of things. There's nothing wrong with being artistic. Look at Norman Rockwell. Millions of people love his magazine covers and I betcha he makes a ton of money.”
Pa grumbled about it, but Ma had got her mind made up that I should take piano lessons. Pa said, “Paulie don't need to take up the piano until he starts doing good
in
school.”
“Paulie
doesn't,”
Ma said. Pa was smart enough, but he was brought up hard. Anyway, Ma had her way, and every Wednesday afternoon I went to Miss Quintana' s and clanged away at the piano. I kind of liked some of that, tooâthough not the exercises. I couldn't work up much interest in playing scales over and over. But it was a lot of fun to just sort of fool around on the keyboard, trying out different things to see what they sounded like. It wasn't up to throwing stones at cats with Rory Flynn, or stealing chips of ice off the ice wagon, but it was interesting enough. And it might have took, but we didn't have a piano at home. Pa said he wasn't going to shell out five dollars a week for a piano just so Paulie would have a place to park his used chewing gum. What I got instead was a piece of cardboard with a life-size piano keyboard printed on it. Every night I had to unfold it across the kitchen table and practice scales on it. It was the emptiest thing I ever didâeven Ma could see thatâbut Pa said it suited him just fine, he'd always been partial to music you couldn't hear. If we'd had a real piano I could have fooled around on, I'd have stuck with itâpracticed the scales enough to keep Miss Quintana content and fooled around the rest of the time. But we didn't. So I lost interest and finally Ma saw it wasn't any good and let me quit. But those lessons with Miss Quintana paid off in the end, for when I finally got interested in music I had a head start.